[Sugar-devel] Limiting Object Chooser to specified MIME types

[Eben Eliason]

Actually, that's not entirely true.  This was considered in the design
for the object chooser, as can be seen here:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Designs/Object_Chooser#03

In addition to specifying the generic type, the intent was to also
allow a boolean which determined whether or not the "kind" menu
remained enabled, and the passing of an array of supported mime types.
This slide illustrates how images of a non-supported type are shown in
the list, but rendered inactive and therefore un-selectable.

As a technical note, any mime types passed which are not a subset of
the generic type will simply be ignored.

Eben


On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 17:35, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>> On 08.05.2009, at 17:03, James Simmons wrote:
>>
>>> Aleksey,
>>>
>>> I was interested in your comment about wrapping Object Chooser for
>>> backward compatibility.  Currently both of my Activities use Object
>>> Chooser, but don't make any attempt to limit what Journal entries
>>> can be chosen.  I would like to limit Read Etexts to the MIME types
>>> text/plain and application/zip, and View Slides to just application/
>>> zip.  In Sayamindu's code he is using mime.GENERIC_TYPE_IMAGE.
>>> There does not seem to be anything comparable that would select what
>>> I want selected.  I'm looking at the code for sugar.mime here:
>>>
>>> http://api.sugarlabs.org/sugar.mime-pysrc.html
>>>
>>> I'm wondering if I could make my own filter in my own Activities
>>> that would limit the Object Chooser to just plain text and Zip
>>> files.  I would of course follow your suggestion for backward
>>> compatibility.
>>>
>>> James Simmons
>>
>> This was discussed several times, last I think in this thread:
>>
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-October/009118.html
>>
>> IMHO it would be quite a bit more useful than the restricted interface
>> we have now. You could build such a chooser yourself using the
>> datastore.find(query) function. But adding a similar "query" parameter
>> to the object chooser was deemed too powerful, possibly unsupportable
>> once the datastore was rewrittten. Maybe a list of mime types would be
>> acceptable to add, though?
>
> A bigger problem than the DS support is the UI. You currently can only
> pass programatically a generic type such as Image instead of
> individual mime types because the UI has only a way to change the
> generic type.
>
> Ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tomeu
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